We have to be grateful to former UKIP councillor Brian Sylvester for supplying us with the perfect image to accompany Brexit. Brian decided to suspend an upside down Union flag between two wheelie bins to celebrate “getting our great country back again” – a blend of jingoistic stupidity and unawareness that defines much of the current British mojo.
It doesn’t seem likely that our “great country” will survive much longer in any event. Scotland is rather tired of its status as an occupied country and wants to stay in the EU – its parliament has voted for a second independence referendum. Northern Ireland’s open border with the Republic is a political conundrum to which a united Ireland (in the EU) is the only logical solution. So into one wheelie bin goes Scotland and into the other goes Northern Ireland, at least that will save Brian the taxing mental conundrum of which way up to suspend the flag.
The whole ethos of Brexit is to put Johnny Foreigner in his place and it’s working already. The number of EU nationals registering as nurses in England has plunged by 92% since the Brexit result, and a record number are quitting the NHS – for some reason they fear not being welcome in our wheelie bin democracy. The NHS will also have to do without the £350 million a week that the EU departure was supposed to deliver – since that has all too predictably turned out to be a lie. As the tories continue to defund and break up the NHS as a prelude to full privatisation, it seems rather unlikely that this fantasy windfall would have been spent on the NHS anyway.
Theresa May’s swashbuckling government has been busy in the pre-Brexit wonderland making sure that the welfare of its citizens remains of paramount unimportance while the wheels of multinational corporations are merrily rolling all over them.
Empowered citizens of the Brexit utopia will doubtless celebrate the takeover of South West Trains by a consortium led by Chinese state metro operator MTR – It seems that three quarters of our railways are owned by foreign state railway operators… but rest assured, our liberated nation in true bulldog spirit will do absolutely nothing to get them back. Now we hear that the railways are to face the biggest cuts since 2008 – warm beer and cricket all round!
Also being triumphantly left in the merciful embrace of foreign nations will be energy suppliers EDF (French), Npower (German), Eon UK (German) and Scottish Power (Spanish) – in fact seven out of the top ten energy suppliers to the UK all send their profits overseas. Rule Britannia!
The future of post-Brexit UK energy production has also turned into a nice little earner for the French and the Chinese who are being paid £18bn to build a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point – the price per megawatt coming in at double the wholesale rate of electricity and using an outdated design that has seen costs triple at other sites. Britannia rules the waves!
No plans to bother Australian private equity sharks Macquarie either – they have extracted £2 billion in dividends since buying Thames Water on the cheap in 2006, this despite having the worst record for leaks of all the UK’s water companies. In a marvellous deal for Britain, Thames Water has been saddled with loans that enable it to pay no tax in the UK and make little progress fixing broken infrastructure. Employees of Thames who now face a £249 million deficit in their pension fund will be comforted to know that Theresa May’s liberation army has no plans to do anything about Thames or any of the other water utilities who are gushing profits overseas.
Post-Brexit plans to track all of Google’s multi billion dollar tax fiddles in the UK involve doing nothing at all – a steadfast continuation of the pre-Brexit policy. This lack of interest in Googles complex tax dodging arrangements allowed the internet behemoth to pay just £36 million pounds in corporation tax in the last year. Independent assessments of how much the UK loses every year in complex corporate tax fiddles go as high as £119 billion – but funding on HMRC is still going to be cut – as announced before Brexit.
Did you know that the UK has the smallest homes by floor space area of any European country with the average new build property covering just 76 sq m compared with almost double that amount in Denmark? But wait, Brexiteers will be pleased to know that government officials have already heroically liberated property developers from the red tape of conforming to even these miserably low space standards. First time buyers in London can now scrape together a deposit for a flat 40% smaller than a travelodge room. Thank heavens we regained control of our great nation, I mean who wants to hoover in flats bigger than 16 square metres all day!
Did you hear the one about the 4 million people in the UK who don’t earn enough to buy enough food? They may be hungry but doubtless their spirits will soar with pride at being in control.
Happily there will no cut backs in money spent hounding and humiliating the ‘workshy’ – people who were previously known as students, homeless, unemployed, disabled, chronically (or terminally) ill or working in jobs that don’t pay enough to live on. Naturally we wouldn’t trust a British company to tell someone dying of cancer that they should get back to work or force chronically disabled people to plead for what they need to live on, so American company Maximus is making a few bob out of it instead. Not that we don’t have home grown talent meeting demanding targets for dishing out benefit sanctions across the land too. The pre-Brexit boom in people being driven to suicide and food banks looks set to get even bigger – take that Europe!
Security in our post-Brexit wonderland will continue to rely heavily on the multinational security behemoth G4S – readers may be unaware that the company is under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office for overcharging the government for tagging criminals who were later found to be dead or abroad. G4S runs prisons, immigration detention centres, police services, schools, hospitals and welfare and public surveillance schemes – getting £700 million of public sector contracts in 2012. Brexit Britain – sticking it to the man!
Brexit is officially going to be marvellous, taking back control of our great nation from overseas power! Well as long as you don’t need to catch a train, a bus, turn on a light switch, a tap, visit a school, a hospital or a library (chances are the library will be closed) and so forth.
With personal savings at a record low, personal debt at a record high and more austerity on the way, there has never been a better time to be British!
Now that we are leaving the EU and its shared market we will be in a splendid position to dictate how much we pay for access to it and on what terms our relationship to the EU will be framed. There is no possibility at all that the EU will use it’s economic muscle to impose terms on us – its obvious that outside and alone we can now force them to kiss her majesty’s pinky ring.
So grab your wheelie bins today – suspend an upside down jack between them adopt a certain chuchillian swagger and roar
“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our austerity, and so fool ourselves, that if the United Kingdom should last for a couple of years before falling apart, men will still say, This was their finest hour…”
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Hargreaves, main backer of VoteLeave.EU : ‘Brexit will bring insecurity. And insecurity is fantastic.’ His net worth ? £1025m. Surely it will now only be fair of and right of him to accept his fair share of insecurity, by giving it all away and starting again, with all the wonderful new opportunities now Article 50’s been triggered on his behalf ?
After the UK is carved up and handed over to corporations and other plutocrats, Theresa May will have to fall back on her husbands fortune , just like Cameron is having to eke out his wife’s £30 million. http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-donations-hargreaves-idUKKCN0Y22ID
I Often wonder why when I ask the question of the remainers, has the EU actually delivered its promise of greater prosperity and security to its member states, has it become a third force in the global configuration of world politics, but I never seem to get a coherent answer. Maybe because the answer if a resounding no. Be advised that some of us leavers acutally know how to use a knife and fork.
However, after all the initial eu(ro)phoria and hopes placed upon the original concept of a non-aligned, social-democratic Euro-bloc, the reality has turned out somewhat differently
At one time the EU project seemed to have a sufficient residue of the original idealism in the present stage of development to persevere further with the political struggle taking place.
I believe that this view, once justifiable and plausible enough, has now become difficult to sustain.
The optimistic view was based on the tacit assumption that the Euro model of capitalism was somehow fundamentally different from the Atlanticist model, a paradigm exemplified by the US/UK axis. In the fullness of time this has, unfortunately, turned out to be a fundamental misconception. The UK of course has always been bound hand and foot to the US in terms of both foreign and economic policy with the ending of the system of imperial preference demanded by the US as the quid pro quo for the American loan negotiated by Keynes, shortly before his death, in 1946; next came the American intervention in the Suez crisis in 1956 which effectively ended any independent UK foreign policy. This dog-like devotion to American imperatives – the ‘special-relationship’ – then extended with the neo-liberal turn and the Reagan-Thatcher counter-revolution of the 198Os. True, the UK was always more Atlanticist in its outlook than its European neighbours. However, continental Europe is as enamoured of Atlanticism as is the UK – and those more recent EU ex-communist states, probably more so.
‘’It is not only the UK which is Atlanticist, the continental European states are no less so … proof of this is given by the central position of NATO in this political construction. That a military alliance with a country outside the union (the US) has been integrated de facto into the European constitution – in terms of a common foreign and security policy – constitutes an unparalleled anomaly. For some European countries (Poland, Hungary and the Baltic States) NATO’s protection- that is, that of the United States against their ‘Russian enemy’ is more important than their adhesion to the European Union.’’ (Samir Amin – The Implosion of Capitalism – 2014)
This Americanization of Europe – this invisible annexation – has been achieved by a combination of soft and hard power – a cultural, political, economic and militaristic assimilation of the old world by the new. It should be understood that the US does not do ‘partnerships’; any relationships the US enters into with other states is always on the basis of ‘Me Tarzan, You Jane.’
‘’ It follows from this that the neither the European Union nor any of its component states any longer have an independent foreign policy. The facts show that there is one single reality: alignment behind whatever Washington (perhaps in agreement with London) decides on its own.’’ (Amin – Ibid)
European Economic policy is similarly aligned to US interests and US practises. This is hardly surprising since the US has been the dominant economic force (although now in a declining trajectory) for the last 100 years. It has control of the world’s reserve currency which allows it to run persistent deficits on its current account since it can simply pay for its imports with by printing its own currency. The US tends to dominate the multilateral institutions such as the IMF and WTO, having the largest bloc of votes in the IMF. American policymakers have used their influence in the IMF to pursue American financial and foreign policy objectives. The IMF offers larger loans to countries heavily indebted to American commercial banks than to other countries. In addition, the IMF offers larger loans to governments closely allied to the United States. (International Politics (2004) 41, 415–429). New York is the second largest financial centre (after London) with the most deeply liquid capital markets, and in absolute terms the US is largest economy in the world. (Although in terms of purchasing power parity, the Chinese economy is now larger.)
Additionally, the ‘soft power’ the US (and UK) which includes, university economics departments, economic think-tanks, publications – The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist – Business and Financial circles, and the universal language of business and diplomacy – English – have effectively dominated and structured the global ideological discourse. The ‘Washington Consensus’ along with the deadly weapons of financial mass destruction – the lethal derivatives – have come to dictate policy and policy making the western world.
Recently, however, the neo-liberal, neo-conservative project has run into difficulties as instanced in the twin crises now besetting the Euro-Atlanticist bloc: namely, Greece and Ukraine.
Greece.
At the outset it was wholly predictable that the accession of Greece into the eurozone was going to lead to trouble. In order to qualify for admission Greece needed to demonstrate that it conformed to the Maastricht Criteria. The Maastricht rules threaten to slap hefty fines on euro member countries that exceed the budget deficit limit of three percent of gross domestic product. Total government debt mustn’t exceed 60 percent.
The Greeks had never managed to stick to the 60 percent debt limit, and they only adhered to the three percent deficit ceiling with the help of blatant balance sheet cosmetics.
Not to worry, in 2010 some creative accounting was supplied by the premier (infamous?) US Investment Bank, Goldman Sachs. GS’s selling point for financial legerdemain is well known; in this instance cross-currency swaps where government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period – and then exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date. Hey, presto! The figures added up (for a while at least). Goldman Sachs collected a $15 billion kickback for their labours.
As members of the eurozone the Greeks then had access to cheap credit from eurozone banks, particularly French and German. But any deal between borrower and lender means that both should act responsibly. The creditworthiness of the borrower has to be assessed before the loan is made. But such rigorous investigations of this sort were not carried out; with the deregulation of finance such tiresome procedures had been done away with and banks lent to almost anyone who had a pulse
The rest as we say is history.
But if these lenders knew that borrowers would not be able to repay the loans, this would have amounted to ‘odious’ debt’. That occurs when the national debt incurred by a regime for purposes that do not serve the best interests of the nation, should not be enforceable. Vulture capitalism is another equally unprepossessing term for the policy toward Greece. Vulture funds target distressed firms or countries buy their the bonds and stocks at knock-down prices, then when the company fails, sue the owner not only for the interest but also the principal. The Troika policy toward Greece has been one of Loan and Foreclosure.
If Greece remains in the eurozone it will continue to be bled white, privatised and ultimately dismembered. An example must be made to stop others in the southern periphery from getting ideas. And just as Thatcher was the junior partner of Reagan in shaping the EU, Merkel has been Obama’s enforcer in the Euro’s restive US provinces.
It is interesting to note that one, Victoria Nuland, rabid neo-con – more of which below – Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State, visited Athens on 17 March and had talks with Tsipras regarding the present turmoil. Suffice it to say it was geopolitics and the retention of Greece in the EU and NATO she was concerned with, rather than debt. She no doubt reminded Tsipras that there might be consequences if Greece did not toe the EU line. As Assistant Secretary for regime change in the State Department the redoubtable Ms Nuland’s brief has been to threaten or bring about regime change in countries of which the US and its vassals disapprove.
Ukraine
Earlier the peripatetic Ms Nuland was also busy in Ukraine promoting regime change – a process which had been going on since 2004 – and the installation of an oligarch-fascist regime paid for ($5 billion according to Ms N) and whose leaders were hand-picked by herself and the US Ambassador in Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt. (I have written extensively on this issue in Chartist available as an e-book on the website.) But it is interesting to note how the IMF’s treatment of the Kiev regime differs significantly to that meted out to Greece. Firstly a $40 billion aid package is granted to Ukraine over the next 4 years. Secondly Madame Lagarde has stated that “In the event that a negotiated settlement with private creditors is not reached and the country determines that it cannot service its debt, the Fund can lend to Ukraine consistent with its Lending-into-Arrears Policy” (12 June 2015) In other words if Ukraine defaults, and there is a strong possibility that the IMF will – in violation of its constitution – come up with the cash. Moreover, the IMF is also not mandated to lend to states which are at war. Of course this is hardly even-handed way of operating, but then the IMF is a highly politicised institution and a key part of the neo-liberal, neo-conservative global establishment. Ukraine will miss a bond coupon payment 17 July, setting off a default on about $19 billion of debt, as a standoff with creditors shows no sign of abating – it will be interesting to see what happens in light of Madame Lagarde’s statement.
Conclusions
The decision to expand the EU and with it NATO right up to Russia’s borders, initially under the guidance and policies of the Clinton administration, was a clear indication that the governments of the EU had come under American domination. With this decisive shift the EU project was over. It has been replaced by a North Atlantic project under American command.
The hegemonist strategy of the US – made abundantly clear in both the Wolfowitz doctrine and the more recent enunciations and actions of the dominant US war party, a coalition of neo-cons, liberal hawks and liberal interventionists – is clearly visible behind the disappearance of what was once the called European project.
However, it is quite possible that even against US wishes and geopolitical imperatives the EU might well fracture internally due to inter-state tensions and contradictions. One thing is certain: in its present structure the EU cannot endure, nor does it deserve to.
The ‘power’ (trade/finance) centres are moving from the US & EU to China and India in the second great world power cycle. This will leave the UK in an area of the world, that is already in decline, on it’s own and heading towards ‘developing’ nation status as trade/finance transitions towards, mainly, SE Asia. The EU will be large enough to withstand, to some extent, this change as it can trade as a group rather than a lonely, insignificant, island in the Atlantic ocean somewhere off Europe. The UK economy will not be big enough to attract the big investment needed in industry as the EU will have the financial power to ‘out deal’ the UK and it’s market is so much larger for investors. The EU is far from perfect but its role will only increase in importance for its members as the decline in the West continues.